That old saying, Time Flies When
You’re Having Fun, is just as true now as it ever was. At least for me. I
checked in on the rant and realized that I hadn’t updated it since July 2014.
Wow!
Since then we found a beautiful
piece of property on top of a mountain and built a house there. We are near
Horseshoe Bend, Idaho, about 25 miles north of Boise. We moved in just
almost exactly 11 months ago. We haven’t stopped moving since.
I look out of my office window and
below is a small valley, you might call it a mini-dell. The other side slopes
up very steeply to a ridge line that makes the sun go down an hour earlier than
where it’s mostly flat. In the bottom of the little valley and due west is my
Cousin Steve’s house. It’s a hundred feet below my elevation, I guess (have to
measure it someday). I swear, in my prime, I could hit a golf ball to his
front yard with a stiff tail wind. 450 yards I suppose? (I am taking it for
granted that I would hit it on the screws, the tail wind is 30mph and I’m getting
every bit of 100’ of drop)
On the left, towards the south end
of the little valley is my cousin’s brother-in-law Allen’s new house. It
finished about the same time as ours. He has a spring fed pond in front of his
place. Even though the house is 4000+ square feet, it is just a vacation home
at this point.
The three houses are all that is
here, and ever will be. Between me, my cousin and Allen, we own all the land.
Mine is just a little 6.5 acres piece. And that’s just fine by me. I look
down on both of them by golly! We joke that we are starting a compound, which
in Idaho can have some significant meaning that you are all free to construe
however you wish.
Below is a picture of our house,
with Steve’s house to the right and Allen’s is straight away dead center. The
picture was taken a bit over a year ago, just before we moved in.
So yesterday, I was sitting at my
desk working, on a conference call in fact, when I looked out of my window to
see about 20 wild turkeys cross Steve’s yard and work their way down hill, to
the right in the photo above. I’ve seen turkeys many times before here, but it
is still cool. About an hour later I watched 6 deer come out of the woods
behind Steve’s house and work their way across his yard and start up my hill.
They usually split left or right around my house, though it is not unusual to
see them in the yard (driveway, patio, looking in the bedroom window, and
“Eating The Flowers Out Of The Pots).
On their way up the hill they
stopped on the little bench below my office and all turned looking intently
back across the valley. What, I wondered, are they looking at? I started
looking around, and then caught a flash of movement low down on the ridge
across the way. Coyote! He was a big fat fluffy one. The winter had been kind
to him. (The deer too, which are looking more shiny and sleek than this time
last year, much better than that rough coated flower thief shown above). I swear he is the same guy Cheryl and I watched catch a mouse in a
snow storm just 20 yards or so from my office window a couple of months ago.
Here he is with the mouse two gulps before it was gone.
That’s the way it goes around here.
I’ve seen elk wander through our valley. Antelope, too, believe it or not.
Badgers, marmots, kestrels and hawks are all prevalent. A heron nests in one of
the trees in the valley, and we are constantly buzzed by geese and ducks. The
quail are forever skittering here and there and beyond.
Cattle wander in the dozens. I get a
huge tax break on the 5.5 acres my house is not sitting on to let the free
range cattle have access to my property. But I sometimes wonder if it is worth
it. They are extremely destructive. They will eat anything that is green,
including the wife’s pansies and violets (which I guess are more colors than
green), poop on everything else, and make a mire out of any soft ground. There
is one big bull that likes to dig giant holes next to the roads, flipping the
dirt onto the road and creating quite an obstacle. Piles of dirt! Steve calls
him a knucklehead. I think he’s a pain in the ass!
But for all this game, there is no
game hunting. Steve, the majority landowner and developer—who as such got to the write
the CC&Rs for the HOA—will not allow hunting. It causes
resentment with many of the locals, who think Steve is keeping all the prime
hunting to himself. It is not true. Steve is a hunter himself, occasionally bagging a bull elk of local terrain. It's just that the animals on his property are like furry relatives and he doesn't want them molested. He would not let Allen kill the marmot that
dug a hole under his new house and set up a cozy marmot condo in the basement. No,
rather than shoot the little pest, we had to catch him and transport him 10
miles across the ridge to another mountain for release. I figure it took the
critter less than a day to get back.
We sold the motorcycles when we
moved in. We have a mile of winding, steep in places, dirt and gravel road once
we leave some questionable paved road to get to our house. That combination of
road and 700 hundred pounds of big cruiser do not play well together. Someone
was going to go down, and it was going to hurt. Cheryl said “sell ‘em, I want a
tractor!” And so we did. Here is here new baby.
This is going on a bit, and there is
still much to tell. But, for now, it is enough to say we are heading toward
retirement. Just a few years left. Getting the ducks lined up, the house
in order, the finances fleshed out and the plans laid.
